The Text of the Gospels in the Works of Gregory of Nazianzus
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The Text of the Gospels in the Works of Gregory of Nazianzus Sarah Julia Guthrie Submitted in accordance with the requirements for the degree of PhD The University of Leeds Department of Theology and Religious Studies September 2005 The candidate confirms that the work submitted is her own and that appropriate credit has been given where reference has been made to the works of others This copy has been supplied on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement Acknowledgements I should like to express my thanks to all those who have helped in the writing of this dissertation; to the late Caroline Bammel for her example; to my husband Robin for his patience and proof-reading; to Professor J. Bradshaw for advice on statistical analysis; to the monastery of S. Catherine, Sinai, for permission to reproduce Gregory's portrait illumination from Codex 330; to Sharon Cowell for help with word-processing. Above all, I should like to express my warmest admiration and gratitude to Professor J. K. Elliott who has been the perfect supervisor throughout this undertaking. As in so many things my lifetime friend Sedwell Diggle has given unfailing support; this study is dedicatedto her with my love and thanks. Et ßt(D TtS Ep(DT1lQEt8 µs Tt row EV T(D KaÄ, Ä.tQTOv, EtlCotµt av oTt etil,ot (EpCIII) , Abstract Citation of the New Testament by the Church Fathers is a valuable resource in reconstructing the early history of its text, for the time and place each was writing is known. The Society for Biblical Literature has undertaken a series of studies of the Fathers who wrote in Greek in order to make available this resource and to examine in detail what light it sheds on textual development. Among these, the fourth-century father Cappadocian Gregory of Nazianzus was a prolific writer whose work is largely he extant; made extensive and virtuoso use of Scripture in his orations, poetry and other writings. In this study, Gregory's life and works are outlined; the use he makes of NT citation is described and evaluated from a text-critical perspective; the particular difficulties this discussed; entails are and the sources and method used to identify citation laid out in chapters One to Three. This study aims to retrieve all his references to the Gospels, to match them to their NT source where this can be determined, and to present them with critical apparatus as either citations, adaptations or allusions. Chapters Four to Seven list these references to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. An evaluation of their contribution to our understanding of NT textual development completes the study. Earlier work in the series has attempted to locate the text used by individual Fathers within the main strands of textual tradition by calculating proportional agreement with a carefully selected representative number of manuscripts. These attempts have had mixed results; in this study the small number of uniquely-derived verbatim citations in Gregory's insurmountable work, the difficulties of transmission and definition, and the loss if great of material rigorous criteria for inclusion are applied, justify the omission of Instead this analysis. a more qualitative approach has sought to do justice to the special strengths of Gregory as a witness to the Gospel textual tradition. Contents Frontispiece: Gregory the Theologian Introduction 1 Chapter One: Gregory's Life and Works 4 Chapter Two: Gregory's Use of Scripture 28 Chapter Three: Identifying Citation and Allusion 40 Chapter Four: The Text of Matthew's Gospel in Gregory's Works 54 Chapter Five: The Text of Mark's Gospel in Gregory's Works 97 Chapter Six: The Text of Luke's Gospel in Gregory's Works 102 Chapter Seven; The Text of John's Gospel in Gregory's Works 133 Chapter Eight: Conclusion: Gregory's Contribution to Understanding the Development of the Gospel Text 178 Bibliography 186 Appendix I: Citations and Allusions of Indeterminate Source 193 Appendix II: Unidentifiable Allusions 269 Map of the Eastern Mediterranean in Late Antiquity List of Tables: Table 1 178 Table 2 181 1 The Text of the Gospels in Gregory of Nazianzus Introduction The Gospelsand other New Testament(NT) writings were written in the sixty or so years after the death of Jesus, but of these originals no witness earlier than the first quarter of the second century is extant. So greatly valued were these records by the earliest Christian communities that they were carefully and repeatedly copied; they were translated from the original Greek into other languages, Latin and those used in communities in outlying parts of the Roman Empire; and Christian teachers and scholars made extensive use of them in their own writings to expound faith and practice. These three classes of witnesses - the Greek manuscripts, the versions, and quotations by the Church Fathers - not only enable scholars today in the task of ascertaining the text of the NT, but also the reconstruction of its history. The particular importance of patristic citation for the latter is that in most cases both the time and the place where the Father worked are known. The use of this most valuable resource by textual scholars has however been hampered by what Fee calls "a great lacuna in NT studies" 1, namely, the lack of carefully collected and usefully presented material. It is to address this that the Society of Biblical Literature has begun to publish its series The New Testament in the Greek Fathers. Now under the general editorship of M. W. Holmes, the series aims to publish the NT text of a given Father and offer a scholarly analysis of it. Seven volumes have now appeared, the first of which was B. D. Ehrman's (1986) Didymus the Blind and the Text of the Gospels (SBLNTGF 1). The present study profits therefore from "l'avantage de s'embarquer `dans un train en marche' comme on dit... la partie 6tant d6jä engag6e et les r6gles du jeu bien 6tablies" (Mossay 1980, p. 10)! In their 27th edition of the Novum TestamentumGraece (hereinafter NA27), Kurt and BarbaraAland considerablyrevised the critical apparatusof earlier editions. This revision incorporateda thorough review of patristic citation. The criteria for selectionof thesewitnesses, listed on pp. 74-6*, are set out in the Introduction (p.72*); t Fee, G.D. (1995) The Use of the Greek Fathersfor New TestamentTextual Criticism. In: Ehrman,B. D. ý and Holmes, M. W. 1995) ch. 12. p, 2 later Fathers and those not writing in Greek or Latin are excluded. Because "selection is weighted towards the more important Greek fathers of the early period" (pp. 72-3 *), it is something of a mystery as to why Gregory of Nazianzus (c. 329-389 CE) has been omitted. It is true that there are particular challenges presented by his use of the NT- Gregory wrote no commentaries2 and only one of the Orations (XXXVII) actually expounds a text, namely Mt. xix 1-12. Moreover he makes surprisingly little direct use of citation. But he was a prolific writer and one much treasured by successive Christians3; generations of there are extant forty-four Orations4 - discourses given or intended to be given in public for a range of purposes, didactic, invective, expository, apologetic, encomiastic -; poems including the autobiographical apt tiov eau rou 3tov (De Vita Sua, hereinafter DVS); and two hundred and forty-five letters; moreover the witnesses to the text of all these, in copies, translations and citations, are copious. There is thus no shortage of material; what the Alands perhaps found lacking is a usable presentation of it that gives ready access not only to Gregory's profound knowledge of and linguistic immersion in the Gospels of his time, but also to the NT text in front of him. The present study sets out to gather systematically all citations of, and as far as possible allusions to the Gospels in Gregory's works, and to compare them with a range of NT mss. I have limited myself to the Gospels because to include the entire NT in this study would be to risk running out of time; citation of Paul, of the Catholic Epistles, and of the books of Acts and of Revelation must await a second project. Chapter Three describes in detail how I have set about this task. The first chapter provides a brief 2 Or none that have survived. Perhaps they were given viva voce: Jerome (De Viris Illustribus 117) admired Gregory as praeceptor meus et quo Scripturas explorante didici. Hanson (p. 700) thinks Jerome was "a pupil or hearer of Gregory's in Constantinople from 379/80 till the end of Gregory's stay in that We know that Gregory's became the the city" . moreover not all works part of canon: existence of " swv µr1 avaytyvwaKOµsvwv ?.oywv" (Sinko, p. 2) is attested for example by the little poem by It XIthC Byzantine poet John Mauropous, who" a d&cid6 de faire lire les oeuvres de notre Gr6goire "qu' on< ne lisait pas", de les recopier et de les diffuser " Mossay (1980) p. 29 n. 1 Cf also references listed including Hoerander (1976) Po6sie in: Travaux et M6moires 6, pp. 261-2. 3 Noret, J (1983) describes him as "Gregoire de Nazianze, l'auteur le plus cite apr6s la Bible, dans la littdrature eccldsiastique byzantine". In Mossay, J. (ed) II. [Deuxi6mel Symposium Nazianzenum. Paderborn, Ferdinand Schoningh pp. 259-266. Other contributors to the Symposium describe on-going study of the oriental versions of Gregory's works, extant translations of which into Coptic, Armenian, Georgian, Syriac, Arabic and Ethiopian, and eventually Slavonic, all testify to his widespread and longlasting popularity.